


Coffee & TV

by lorax



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cold Weather, Holiday Fic Exchange, M/M, Marvel RarePair Exchange, Multi, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:42:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2775131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/lorax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fact that he knew their coffee orders was the least weird part of that day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coffee & TV

**Author's Note:**

> [Queenofpie/Queenofsnowflakes](http://queenofsnowflakes.tumblr.com/) wanted fluffy Sam/Steve(/Bucky), some snow, and maybe a wall. This came out a little less fluffy than expected, but I hope it suits anyway! Happy holidays!

**Coffee & TV**

They found Bucky eight months in, but when anyone asked, he was still in the wind. Sam wasn't called in for the big Avengers throw downs yet, but he got the gist from Steve, and Natasha kept him up to date when she breezed through with intel and a different haircut every time. Somewhere out there, somebody who should be dead was putting SHIELD back together, and whenever it got mentioned Steve's jaw went tight and his eyes got distant. Sam didn't blame him. Even without the risen dead in charge, Sam wasn't sure he wanted to see SHIELD back in action. It was a little too close to cutting off a head and having two more pop back up still, in his book. Some things, they went down they needed to stay down.

But they had their own deal. Sam kept his head down, he helped where he could while they looked for someone who made it pretty clear he wasn't looking to be found at first. It was probably a good thing in the beginning — the whole damn world wanted scapegoats. The guy with the metal arm who twelve hundred camera phones caught trying to kill Captain America would have made a good one. If they blamed half the ugly on him maybe people would forget how much of that fault really went elsewhere. Steve wasn't about to let that happen though. And after a while, neither was Sam. If they couldn't find Bucky, then no one else was tracking him down either. Steve took comfort in that.

It wasn't fair to say they finally found Bucky so much as Bucky stopped moving and found them. He showed up on the doorstep of the cheap rental they were crashing at in Chicago with the locations for five Hydra bases, three still-steaming coffees, and a flash drive full of the plans for Hydra's souped up version of the EXO-7. The first thing Bucky said to Sam was _sorry about your wings_. The first thing he said to Steve was _they were out of tofee-nut_. The fact that he knew their coffee orders was the least weird part of that day.

It should have been more of a shock than it was, but Bucky had been leaving clues, dropping hints at Hydra bases they found a step later than he had. Steve would find scraps of memories amidst the ruin of equipment they'd once used to take away Bucky's past, and Sam would never know if he was happy or sad because Steve was so much of both at the same time. Steve did the same thing when they hit one before Bucky, leaving sketches or things behind to help Bucky find his way. It was the saddest kind of note passing Sam had ever seen. It made Steve smile, too, but some days it felt like Sam was watching Steve throw himself into the same water, over and over. Even if it always washed him back to shore, it didn't mean he wasn't drowning in the meantime.

Sam maintained that wasn't why he kissed Steve the first time, though. He kissed him because Steve refused to read a map properly, and it was either kiss him, or run him over with a car until Sam was done being mad at him, and kissing him seemed like the better call. (And because Sam followed him from place to place, through danger after danger, and fell in love with him, and that had probably been as inevitable as Steve finding Bucky. People who flew always fell the hardest.) He'd kissed him, and he'd taken him to bed, and Sam had done it all knowing that Steve was looking for someone he'd loved before Sam was ever born, and that Steve didn't understand that half as well as Sam did. Sam would tell him, but it seemed like the kind of thing Steve needed to figure out for himself.

Or maybe Sam just wasn't a saint and he wasn't in a hurry to give away something he'd only just managed to take for himself. Bucky was pieces of someone ripped to shreds, wrapped inside the body of a man still learning how to function. Steve might be what Bucky needed, sometime soon, but Sam hadn't known if Bucky would ever be what Steve wanted him to be again. And Sam could tell himself he was in it for Steve until he was blue in the face. He even tried to at first, because Sam hadn't wanted to feel the crush of loss and the helplessness that came after it ever again, but he woke up in the mornings with his head full of Steve and even when he was angry at the dude, he wanted to be near him that night. Sam knew what that meant. He knew how stupid it was, and it didn't stop it from happening at all. He'd known since he sat beside that hospital bed, waiting for Steve to wake up. It didn't matter how bad an idea it was to fall in love with Steve Rogers while you helped him find the only living person who might remember the world he woke up missing — it had happened anyway.

So Sam wasn't proud of it, but Bucky handed him a coffee and plans to wings he'd found God knows where, and Sam's first thought was that he wished it'd taken longer.

His second thought was to wonder about the coffee thing. Which Bucky never did explain, but Sam assumed meant he had been creepy spying for a while. It was probably fair; they'd been creepy following him for the better part of a year.

When the two of them came back together again, they were both working so damn hard at being fine that it about made Sam crazy. They weren't fine. They shouldn't feel like they had to be fine. Sam had learned how to see through the cracks in Steve's facade pretty damn quick, and he still didn't know whether it was just because he _got_ Steve, or because Steve had needed to let someone see and Sam had been there. But Steve would throw smiles and jokes Bucky's way, check his temperature at every turn and try to look like he wasn't. Sam would bet the wings Stark started building him that Bucky saw through it, but he didn't push. Sam would bet Steve's shield that Bucky used to push, but didn't remember how anymore.

And Bucky — Bucky was a thin skin, strung over a skeleton full of healing fractures and brittle bones. But he knew how to walk the right way, how to push everything together into the shape he thought he should be. He worked so hard at it that every couple of weeks he would just up and vanish again. Sam knew he had to go recharge, let down, fall apart and let himself be whatever he really was when Steve wasn't watching. So Bucky left, Steve wilted and Sam pulled Steve in and took him to bed or distracted him with seventy-two different movie channels and nothing on. They moved on through cities in rented cars and condos, pulling Hydra apart in bits and pieces while learning the ways they could work around one another and who had the worst taste in road music, since planes weren't usually an option unless they came with a Stark brand and a lot of questions.

It was a pattern was what it was, and Sam recognized it, and knew it was probably the kind that wasn't good. Steve wasn't using him. He wasn't hiding them like a secret. It wasn't like Bucky showed up and Sam and Steve turned off — Steve had never done that. But it was different, and Sam knew it, and there was going to have to be a day when he called Steve on it and changed the pattern because Sam knew himself. He knew how ruts could start to feel cozy after a while, no matter how much you shouldn't just lay down and wedge yourself in them. 

And he'd do that.

Any day now.

In the meantime, Sam was just in so much damn trouble. Steve had been a given since that first day, when he was a smart ass in a tee shirt clinging for dear life whom Sam had seen something kindred in. But Bucky snuck up on him. He was like Steve in some ways — they were both good guys who didn't realize that being good guys was a big deal for most people. He struggled with the things he'd done, but worked for equilibrium about it in a way that Sam admired. He grumbled where Steve was sarcastic and was unexpectedly charming where Steve was awkward. He knew their coffee orders, and after the first week, he knew how to make scrambled eggs the way Sam liked them, and which brand of orange juice Sam hated but Steve didn't, and to never ever let Steve be in charge of navigation. Bucky barely slept and he didn't touch anyone unless they touched him first, but he petted every dog they passed without fail. He hated cell phones, but loved computers. He yelled at Steve like there wasn't seventy years and a few murder attempts in between the last time he'd tried to talk Steve out of something, but he flinched at the sound of machinery and Sam could always read something in the set of his shoulders that said he was waiting for the moment when his world dropped out on him again.

Bucky smiled sometimes, and it was usually at Steve, but not always, and Sam _wanted_. He was sure that he needed hours and hours of therapy with an actual professional and maybe some confessional time, even though he wasn't Catholic. It probably couldn't hurt at this point. But that smile pulled him the way Steve had pulled at him. Different men, different strings connecting them — but the same kind of connection that made Sam want to stamp himself into their lives and be a safe space they could turn to when everything else was aliens and Hydra and memories.

And yeah, he wanted Steve to talk to him, and argue with him, and drink his weirdly complicated coffee while Sam used his thigh for a pillow. And he wanted a smile from Bucky that was for him, where the shadows in his eyes were just a little further away for a second.

Eight months in, Bucky found them. Three after that, he fell asleep on the sofa without checking their perimeter for the first time, and when he jerked awake from dreams swallowing a scream he fixed himself a Pop Tart (which was a terrible and offensive habit that Sam blamed entirely on Natasha and Barton, who had sacked out for two weeks a month ago with bullet holes and watched four seasons of Gilmore Girls with Barton eating nothing that wasn't processed) before he ran out the door. Sam watched as Steve stared after him, squared his jaw, and then Steve was kissing him hard, grabbing coats off hooks and following Bucky out the door of their crappy rented Maine condo into the building snow outside.

Sam had that same traitor of a thought again. He'd known Steve would go after Bucky someday. He'd known they'd have to work it out. He'd known a lot of things had to happen. But he _wished it'd taken longer_.

He sacked out on the sofa and resolutely flapped some birds and crushed some candy on his phone. The TV he left on a shameful run of terrible, terrible holiday movies. The movies ran banners at the bottom every so often to helpfully tell him how much it was going to snow, so he could think about the formerly frozen supersoldier and former cryogenically suspended assassin he was pining over being out in the snow somewhere, huddled up for warmth and working out their issues while Sam's issues grew to sizes that meant they probably should start paying rent.

Somewhere in the middle of a rom-com that had neither _rom_ nor com anywhere in it, Sam nodded off. He came awake to the sound of the door and the bolt of ice cold air that came with it opening. Steve stood in the doorway, peeling off coat and gloves while Bucky vanished into his own room to do the same. Bucky passed Sam on the way and picked up the remote Sam had dropped on the floor, handing it to him with a little quirk of his lips that wasn't quite a smile before he was out of sight.

Steve smiled after him, rosy-cheeked and pleased, and Sam hated him almost as much as he loved him, and just how big both those emotions were was scaring the shit out of Sam when he was half awake and all too aware of what was coming down the pipeline at him. "He came back right away," Sam said dumbly. He dropped the remote on the cheap coffee table and got up to duck into the kitchen and start coffee to warm them up.

"Yeah," Steve said, trailing after him.

Bucky had never done that before when he put himself on time out. "He tell you where he goes when he leaves?" Sam asked. Steve snaked an arm around him and Sam hissed at the chill still lingering on his clothes, but didn't push him away.

"Hotels. Vacant places. No single place," Steve said. "He … we talked. He's good, Sam. I mean he's not, but I think it'll be all right, mostly." He smiled wryly. "Aside from the government agencies that want to lock him up and the people that regularly want to kill us. All right is getting pretty relative, these days."

Sam shut his eyes and leaned against the counter, faced away from Steve. "Good. That's good, man. You two need to have some stuff out. Because, let me tell you, I get tired just watching you be fine at each other half the time."

Steve laughed, and his hand ran down Sam's back. "Probably a ways to go but …" Sam felt the shrug he couldn't see. "He knows he doesn't have to go when he needs space. And that I don't … expect everything to go back to what it was."

He didn't was the thing. Sam didn't think Steve wanted to turn back any clocks, and he'd take Bucky however he came now. That didn't mean he didn't miss the friend he used to have, but Steve didn't want everything to be the same deep down because the same meant being in love with a guy _he wasn't ever with_. Sam should just say that. He should get it out and get it done and start burning some damn bridges so he stopped trying to leave them all open to cross back himself. But he didn't. Sam turned around instead and pulled Steve in to kiss him.

Steve hummed a sound against his lips, chilled hands settling at Sam's hips. He pulled Sam away from the counter, pushing him up against the wall opposite it. Sam's back hit with a soft thud and the flimsy shelves that served as a pantry rattled a little. Steve was smiling, warmth penetrating the chill as he pressed up against Sam, kissing him, solid length of his body pinning Sam against too thin walls. He held Sam steady and Sam could feel Steve's heartbeat, the half-hard heat of his dick where it pressed against his thigh. Sam hated the flash of his mind that wondered if Steve wished he was kissing Bucky, if he'd been hard thinking of it. Hated the little prickle of curiosity in his own mind that wondered what it would look like, the pair of them kissing, or what Bucky's mouth would feel like against his own.

The thoughts, even hard as he wanted to deny them, dragged reality in close enough that Sam bit back the moan Steve's thigh wanted to drag out of him. He realized they were right out in the open in the kitchen, number one, and more importantly, right up against a paper thin damn wall that connected to the room Bucky was actually IN at the moment. "Steve," Sam said. Steve's teeth skimmed his jaw, eyebrow cocked in question between kisses. "Steve," Sam repeated, managing to make it sound reasonably close to _stop_ this time. It was close enough to it that Steve's head lifted obediently, body still mashed up against Sam's so moving was an issue, but he gave enough room to see Sam's face. "Open door, man. And that wall is not going to do much about keeping Bucky from hearing a play-by-play," Sam said, not without regret.

"Mmm hmmm. I know," Steve said, going back to kissing along Sam's neck. Sam was pretty sure Steve wasn't listening, but then Steve spoke again, voice a low ripple of sound against Sam's skin. "He just wants to listen, and maybe watch. For now."

Sam's body froze up for long enough that he legitimately forgot to breathe temporarily, and then he jerked his head away to stare at Steve. "I - what?"

Steve, the utter, complete asshole, was laughing at him. "He wants to listen? You know?" He made a gesture with his hand to imply what Bucky planned to do while listening, and it was a level of obscene Captain America should probably never do, but that delighted Sam for reasons he probably shouldn't examine closely. "Listen?" Sam couldn't summon words and just blinked. Steve's smile softened and his head tilted. "Sam … I got the idea my boyfriend kind of likes Bucky. I get it. He's a good looking guy. Since I kind of like the jerk too, I think that can work out. But he needs time, and I need you."

Sam's heart was doing the kind of double-time beat that usually happened when he was about to maybe do something that would get him killed, or when he was miles in the air and diving fast through clear skies. "You love him, Steve," he said dumbly.

"Yeah," Steve admitted. "But I love you too." His eyes narrowed, but he was smiling still. "So … you thought what? Bucky and me worked it out and you and me were over? Think I'm insulted, Sammy," he said.

"Don't call me Sammy," Sam said numbly, hands sliding to ridiculously muscled shoulders and gripping tight.

"You thought I'd dump you. No faith in me. You should probably make it up to me," Steve said, batting his eyes ridiculously.

Sam loved him like he loved a free fall, and he still half wanted to run over him with a car. "There are so many things wrong with you," he told Steve.

Steve grinned, wide and dopey, and then sank to his knees, long fingers tugging down Sam's sweats, wrapping around his dick and stroking. His other hand pressed firmly against Sam's stomach, thudding him back against the wall again and pinning him there as Steve leaned in, kissing his hip. "Make noise for Bucky, Sam," he said, half purring. But for a second he broke, looking up at Sam, blue eyes soft and searching. "This could be good, couldn't it?"

Sam swallowed, hands sliding into Steve's hair. "Yeah," he croaked. "Yeah, Steve. It could be good. If he wants, if you want. I … you know I'm gone for you, right? For him too, I think."

There was a long beat while they stared at each other, and then a soft thump from the other side of the wall. Steve's eyes flicked toward the sound and he grinned. "Buck wants," he said simply. "You mean a lot to him. We'll all talk about it. Later." He stroked Sam's dick again, repeating with a crooked smile. "Later." 

Because he had plans now, Sam guessed. And Sam was dizzy in love and still stunned, but he could go with it. He'd been following Steve for a year. He could keep following him in this. Steve leaned in, mouth warm and wet around him, and Sam held on to his hair and rocked against the heat of his mouth and the press of his hand, Pop Tart boxes falling off the shelves and Steve's name tripping off his lips over and over. From the other side of the wall he heard a muffled sort of gasp, only just loud enough to hear, and then Sam heard himself say Bucky's name, and the gasp got louder, and Steve groaned around his cock. Sam came with ragged breath in his ear that Sam wasn't sure he hadn't imagined the sound of, but it got him off just the same. He dragged Steve up against him when Sam could breathe again, wrapping his hand around him and jerking him off fast and rough while Sam kissed him.

Steve sagged into him afterward, wall creaking alarmingly, boneless and tilted into Sam, both of them catching their breath. Sam didn't hear anything — Bucky was still ghost quiet when he wanted to be — but suddenly Bucky was standing there, cheeks flushed and hair mussed. He bit his lip and then stepped in close, right hand touching Steve's mouth, light and lingering. Steve smiled, kissed his fingertips. When Bucky looked at Sam, Sam saw the question there and nodded permission. Bucky could do whatever he wanted to Sam right now. Sam was pretty sure Bucky could _always_ do whatever he wanted. Bucky just smiled, unsure and so careful as he leaned in, mouth touching Sam's brief and warm and soft before he pulled away. Bucky walked over, dim kitchen lighting catching on the metal of his arm as he started to fix them coffee.

Steve laughed, punch-drunk happy, and pushed off from Sam, coming back with a dishtowel to clean Sam's hand up with. He pulled up Sam's pants and then bustled Sam out to the sofa, pushing him down and then sinking down on one side of him, pulling Sam in close and wrapping an arm around him. A few minutes later, Bucky appeared balancing three mugs of coffee, handing them out and hesitating a long second before he sank down on Sam's other side, right shoulder against Sam's as yet another truly, offensively terrible holiday movie played. "You have shit taste in movies," Bucky told him.

"It was just on man, don't even start. You two took off for half the night. You don't get remote privileges," Sam told him, arguing automatically. But he was beaming, and Steve's arm was tight around him, mouth dropping little kisses along his neck. Sam had followed Steve on this to have his back. He'd spent these last months thinking he was looking after them.

He thought maybe it turned out, they'd been looking after him just as hard, but Sam had missed it. And that was better. That was _good_.

Bucky grumbled about the heartwarming moral that was telegraphing subtle as a jackhammer at the end of the movie he hadn't even seen the rest of, and Sam gave in and handed him the remote. He looped a careful arm around Bucky and smiled so wide it hurt his face when Bucky just leaned into it after a beat. Sam snuggled them both in closer against Steve and let Bucky pick the movie. It didn't really matter what they watched anyway, long as they were all here to complain about it.


End file.
